writing faeries

We’ve had the truck break down on the road, had to take off into the woods on foot, gotten lost, been chased through a wide open meadow by beasties, come across an abandoned mill, and been trapped by a mountain lion!

Serious shit.

Writing this action sequence has been really interesting… we can fly along, since our outline is pretty solid. We know the sequence of events, and the left-margin, to keep the pacing flowing, is by necessity very Hemingway-esque… no Literary flourish.

The lion advances.

She takes aim.

The cat sniffs the air, growls.

Her trigger finger tenses.

Like that. Very short and sweet.

Similarly, our dialogue through these passages goes quickly, since at this point there is no subtext — when people shout “Look out! Run!” that’s pretty much what they mean. We don’t have to struggle with finding their hidden meanings, with finding subtle ways to communicate unspoken intentions. So the pages are flying by.

We got our heroes into the crazy old lady’s house, learned her radio isn’t working, got her Daddy’s old 1940’s pickup running, and have escaped just as the creatures attack.

Now we’re on the road down off the mountain.

Interestingly, a point of contention has been whether or not one could even get an old 1940’s truck that’s been in storage for 60 years to start. I’m of the camp that says “weirder things have happened” — both in this script and in other stories. Seriously, the woods are full of strange semi-mythical beasties and we’re concerned over whether it’s realistic for an old truck to start up? Sean has long since become less critical of the idea. But in deference to Sean (and other similarly critical readers) we’ve long ago agreed that we’d infer the COL (Crazy Old Lady) has been keeping the truck running in hopes her Daddy might come home. We gave her a line (“I’m not allowed to drive, but Daddy lets me start his truck every morning.”) and we’ll dress out the garage with some oil cans and a gas can.

We keep thinking we’re past any real subtext, then finding ourselves in a scene where someone has a secret or a secret is revealed… takes lots longer to suss out those scenes, to keep that dialogue ringing true, and still keep the pacing up where it needs to be at this point. It’s essentially an action sequence, but every line still comes from a character whose backstory and emotional profile has been pretty well defined, so we can’t get away with any lazy writing.

Which is fine — we’d rather be writing a hard story about complex characters than spewing out something cardboard and easy.

Two more days of story outline refinement. Didn’t make any huge changes in the outline, but just focused on some greater detail in the events, made sure we understood each character’s motivations and state-of-mind going into each scene.

In the process, discovered two HUGE plot holes (ashamed to admit) but plugged them.

Sometimes you read something over and over again and don’t see the typos… these holes have the same magical quality. Our heroes spend the whole third act in a desperate effort to get to safety and a radio. When they get to that place, they spend their time with a rube goldbergian experiment to help ward off the beasties… but never use the radio.

Similarly, they take off in the end headed for town, by way of a route we’ve earlier established has been compromised.

It wasn’t hard to fix… in our minds eyes we knew kind of why that was, but we realize that we’d never addressed it. So now we’ve addressed it. Both of ’em. Fixed. Phew!

Still, feeling kinda stoopid.

Did end up writing out the dialogue for one passage… probably the last scene in the film in which we’ll have an opportunity to reveal anything about the characters through any real subtext. Last chance for a “real conversation”, in other words, so wanted to be sure we hit any points that needed hitting, yet find an elegant way to do it that didn’t feel forced. It actually worked out quite nicely, and also reveals just a little more mythos around the creatures at the same time. We’re pretty proud of it.

So we’ve got one or two scripts up on InkTip.com… have had many prodcos read the synopses, one or two read the script. No earth shattering leads from the service so far.

BUT we do subscribe to the InkTip newsletter, in which we get leads on prodcos who are looking for specific kinds of writers or scripts. This week’s newsletter came through, and there’s a surprisingly good fit for this current project we’re working on…

We can’t give away the details of our creature, but I think it’s safe to say this: our story follows two young couples who buy a cabin in the Northern California woods, only to find the woods are teeming with strange mythological beasties.

Today’s InkTip lead is from a prodco looking for a horror film that takes place in Northern California, and features beasties of a mythological type.

So we ask ourselves — how many people are there with scripts that specifically suited to this prodco’s request? We’re hoping, “few”.

Problem is, we can’t respond to the InkTip posting without having the script completed and WGA registered (InkTip rules). So we’ve made a renewed commitment to complete the script in one week. We’ve got 61 pages done, so if we can average 4-5 pages a day, we can be at our 90 goal inside 7 days. Hopefully in time to contact said prodco.

And if we don’t get in with them, we’ll still be done – which is always a good thing.

Good progress past two days. Got nearly 7 pages done… The cabin has burned down. Our heroes have survived, made their way to a nearby house, and are hammering on the door looking for help. The door is opened and…

We’re in the middle of what we’re calling the “juggernaut” — the high energy run through the third act while pursued by bloodthirsty creatures. This is just the beginning…

What came out of the research around “why is this thing so buggy” is that we had cut and pasted our original outline from MS Word, which Zhura apparently gets terribly confused by. The answer, according to at least some of the postings we found on their discussion forums, should be to “copy the current script, paste it into a plain text doc, and then upload that plain text doc into a new Zhura file”.

So that’s what I did today. Of course, it worked less than perfectly. Though it recognized “int.” and “ext.” as sluglines and formatted them so, it didn’t recognize any character names or dialogue, so everything is formatted as action. We’ll have to go through and manually reformat all those elements (kiss a couple hours goodbye – again).

But once that’s done, all should be good, right?

We’re crossing our fingers that this will keep the bugginess to a minimum.

We’ll keep you posted.

*EDIT – A post on John August’s blog offers a video capture rundown of some of the new FD8 features, the Project Manager from FD chimes in, and the comments include some thoughts on CeltX.

Today was a tough day logistically… Sean planned to work remotely via Zhura, but ended up with errands to run and participated largely by phone while picking up prescriptions and other such mundane tasks. He did his valiant best to stay focused, especially considering he wasn’t able to see the screen and keep up with my edits in real time (save for a few minutes he stopped at a Starbucks for the wifi) and I had to read back to him, get his comments, edit a bit and read back, and so on. We did manage to get some work done, but it wasn’t the most creatively satisfying session we’ve had, for either of us.

Nevertheless, we added some good stuff, and got to the “money shot” — the first clear shot of the creature. Killing the cute puppy. Then everybody freaks out, and the group decides to drive down off the mountain.

We’ve completed the story up to the point where the creatures are to be revealed, and our characters have to take off on a dangerous journey through the mountains while being pursued.

Today, we wanted to review the outline, and add more clear roadblocks to their juggernaut trip (is that redundant?) to create explicit points of conflict escalating toward the final resolution. We had a general escalation outlined, but wanted to make it better defined before starting the writing.

We’re going to create three challenges. We’ve chosen two and will find the third tomorrow. It’s important that the incidents feel organic to the story, driven by, resolved by, or directly affect elements already present in our mythos or in our characters. No lame “oh, I fell, I twisted my ankle!” moments.

More importantly, we had one major plot point to nail down. We’ve got two primary male characters… dude A is a douchebag, dude B is a good guy. The original plan was to have dude douchebag killed early in the juggernaut, and dude good guy die later, near the end. Dude douchebag was intended to be a somewhat shallow character, not quite a red-shirt, but not someone people would be connected to – or more to the point, he would be someone whose death people might cheer.

However, he’s grown, since we let him choose his voice to a certain extent, and has become more defined and complex. That’s great… he’s a multi-layered douchebag.

Our good guy is still complex… a nice guy with a troubled marriage (though he doesn’t know it), who just wanted to have some quiet time to write (a purposeful cliche – or homage) who has been royally screwed by his best friend and business partner (dude douchebag).

Neither of these guys is going to make it out alive… the overall goal is to have our primary woman character develop into a stronger person over the adventure… to become a hero a-la Ripley.

She’s about to be sent on a cross-country forest trek to (hopefully) safety, pursued by beasties, with two other women, and one of these two guys. Both of the other women are rather duplicitous and can’t be trusted either. They’re just more emotionally accessible than dude douchebag.

So here’s the question… do we want to kill off the douchebag character so early now that he’s become more interesting, and have our audience watch the good guy character make the trip through the forest? Or kill off our good guy, and have our audience watch the bad guy character make the trip?

Are we (and our story, and our characters, and our audience) better served by sending our growing hero through the woods with two other women and a douchebag guy? Or with two other women and a good guy?